The virtualization client serves a single point of administration for a vCenter or ESX server. All administration activities such as backups, restores, schedules, and reports can be performed from the virtualization client.

To perform backup operations, each virtualization client can include multiple proxies where the Virtual Server Agent is installed. The virtualization client also enables proxy teaming, enabling proxy failovers for fault tolerant backups. Using multiple proxies for each virtualization client makes it possible to perform backups for a large number of virtual machines in a limited backup window.

Once you configure the Virtual Server Agent for a vCenter, all virtual machines in the vCenter are automatically selected for backup. This behavior is designed to ensure all virtual machines are backed up.

To back up only specific virtual machines in a vCenter, you can define rules to discover virtual machines and automatically select them for backup. This is useful in environments where virtual machines are frequently added or removed . You can easily browse and select vCenter objects such as hosts, datastores, and resource pools as criteria for automatic discovery.

You can view detailed information about each backed up virtual machine on the Virtual Machine Status tab of the View Job Details dialog box. This dialog box is available from the CommCell Console when a backup job is running. It displays information such as the name of the proxy that performed the backup of the virtual machine, the size of the backup data, and the type of backup.

Deduplication at the data block level compares blocks of data against each other. If a virtual machine contains blocks of data that are identical to each other, block level deduplication eliminates storage of redundant data and reduces the size of the data in storage. Deduplication dramatically reduces virtual machine backup data for copies on all media.

Changed Block Tracking (CBT) is a VMware feature that can be used to optimize backups of virtual machines by reading only the allocated and modified portions of a virtual disk. CBT is automatically enabled for virtual machines running on hardware version 7 or later.